Note, take backup of system and data before touching anything in BIOS. It is possible that you brake the RAID trying to disable it.
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Browse All TopicsSo, here is what I am working with:
I have an Asus motherboard with 6 on-board SATA controllers. I have 2 of the drives configured for RAID 0 as my C drive where Windows 7RC is installed. I have 1 IDE hard drive and 1 DVD-R drive running off of the IDE controllers. As long as I leave this configuration, I have no problems.
The problem comes when I try to install my additional SATA drives. As soon as I plug in another SATA drive, Windows will not boot. It gets to the Windows Logo screen and hangs forever. I tried plugging the drive into a different controller and the same thing happens. I tried every combination I could think of with the 6 different SATA controllers (i.e. using SATA controller 0,1 for RAID or 1,2, or 2,3, or 5,6....and nothing seems to work.
Please advise.
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You may have 2 different problems:
1/ Boot order is modified without notice
That happened to me recently : when I add a drive in an unused sata port on my ICH controller, the boot order is reinitialised...and my boot drive is not the default one.
==> Attach the new drive, boot, change the boot order, solved this one
2/ Boot.ini
Windows boot.ini seeks for NTLoader at a drive which path is described in boot.ini
==> Before installing the new drive, modify your boot.ini file to allow booting from every path, that solves the path problem.
More info about ARC path naming convention from MS
Interesting. I checked the BIOS and saw that the boot order was fine - CDROM was first and the SCSI RAID was second which is how it has always been since I first setup RAID. So, I didn't change anything.
This time I was able to boot into WIndows without a problem. The hard drive that I installed showed up in disk managment as "Inactive". So, I right-clicked and selected "reactivate disk". Nothing changed, so I tried it again. Nothing changed, so I chose "delete volume" thinking that I caould just rescan and then re-format the disk. This time it disappeared and I can't get it back. I have tried changing the controller that it is plugged into, rescanning disks - nothing brings it back.
>> Motherboard is an ASUS MCP55-M2N-E
OK. That is a socket AM2, and does seem to have only 1 controller.
A lot of people aren't happy with that board, most of what I have seen is like this:
http://forums.anandtech.co
Try the drive in another system and see if you can see it there.
Don't know if it will help, but you can also unplugging the Asus from the wall (or turn off the power switch on the PSU), take out the battery and do a Clear CMOS. Don't forget to reset the Time/Date and boot order.
The drive works in my other Windows 2003 server box without a problem, so I know the drive is good.
After reading that post, I am considering replacing the motherboard, but I want to make sure it isn't just a configuration issue first.
If I reset the CMOS, wont that kill my RAID0 config? I'll have to reinstall Windows again (I just installed Windows 7 Pro on Friday night)
I have not tried bcdedit yet because the drive does not even show up in disk management anymore. Also, BIOS does not even pick it up either. At boot the BIOS checks the memory and the video card and shows all the SATA controllers. However, the SATA hardd rive I have plugged in does not show up in that POST check. I am going to try a different hard drive and see if it will detect.
So, I thought I had it figured out. I put the hard drive into my other box and was able to look at it's contents. It had my previous installation of Windows 7RC on it. I thought maybe the boot partition was mucking things up, so I formatted the drive. I put it back into my Windows 7 box and the same thing happened - frozen at the Windows logo screen. I unplugged and checked the event log and found this...
Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.
I think it's safe to assume the drive is good and the problem is with my motherboard/controllers.
I am going to reset CMOS and start from scratch.
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by: noxchoPosted on 2009-10-23 at 17:28:48ID: 25650096
Is RAID configured using onboard RAID controller?
Check in BIOS if you have two RAID controllers and configure one as SATA or enhanced IDE.